1. Field
This disclosure relates generally to semiconductors, and more specifically, to error correction circuits used in semiconductor memories.
2. Related Art
Semiconductors, such as memories, are susceptible to a well documented problem known as soft errors. Soft errors are caused by radiation sources such as alpha particles, high energy neutrons and gamma particles, for example. These radiation sources impart sufficient energy to bit cells of memories to cause the programmed value of the bit cells to change. The area of impact from these radiation sources is not believed to have changed significantly over the past several decades. However, during that time the size of electronic circuitry implemented within semiconductors has dramatically reduced. As a result, dimensions of a semiconductor bit cell have dramatically been reduced. Therefore, the total number of adjacent memory bits which can fail from a single alpha particle impact or other single upset event is significant. Others have used error correction techniques to address this problem. However, to correct for multiple-bit errors, complex coding schemes are required as a linear coding scheme will not correct multiple-bit errors. Such complex coding schemes are complex and require additional time and power and thus are disadvantageous.